Sunday, April 24, 2016
She can dance with the President
But she can't fly commercial because she doesn't have the required "face card" as she puts it. And at 107 years, the hoops required to jump through to get the required ID become insurmountable barriers.
Virginia McLaurin, who recently turned 107, was still basking in the glow of her dance with President Obama in February. A White House video of the meeting has been viewed nearly 66 million times. The attention has resulted in invitations to New York and Los Angeles for media interviews.She is not only a good dancer, but she illustrates the problems unnecessary ID laws create for people who have lived most of their lives just not paying attention to the brand new shiny requirements of those who too often have an ulterior motive to their high sounding legal acts.
To board an airplane, however, McLaurin needs to replace a long-lost government-issued photo ID.
To get a D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles non-drivers’ photo ID, she needs a birth certificate from South Carolina, where she was born. To get the birth certificate, she needs the photo ID. A classic bureaucratic Catch-22.
“I don’t think I’ll ever get that face card,” McLaurin told me during a recent visit to her apartment in Northwest Washington. “I was birthed by a midwife and the birthday put in a Bible somewhere. I don’t know if they even had birth certificates back then.”
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